Scientists "grow" brain that flies a jet

Scientists from Florida University, USA have successfully "grown" a living brain utilizing 25,000 nerve cells from a rat.

The brain which was grown/cultured in a laboratory petri dish, was then interfaced with a computer and an F-22 flight simulator program. At first it crashed, but soon learned how to fly the plane and even manage to control the aircraft in hurricane-force winds.

"We're interested in studying how brains compute," said Thomas DeMarse, the professor of biomedical engineering at the university responsible for the study. "If you think about your brain, and learning and the memory process, I can ask you questions about when you were 5 years old and you can retrieve information. That's a tremendous capacity for memory. In fact, you perform fairly simple tasks that you would think a computer would easily be able to accomplish, but in fact it can't."

"While computers are very fast at processing some kinds of information, they can�t approach the flexibility of the human brain. In particular, brains can easily make certain kinds of computations � such as recognizing an unfamiliar piece of furniture as a table or a lamp � that are very difficult to program into today�s computers."

"If we can extract the rules of how these neural networks are doing computations like pattern recognition, we can apply that to create novel computing systems."

The team hope the experiment will help develop treatments for brain disorders such as epilepsy, however more worringly, interfacing the biological and techological in this manner could be the start of A.I. on a deadly scale.

Systems of this nature could theoretically be designed and "taught" to control major public software systems and even military applications.

What happens if the system turns on it's creator...

www.napa.ufl.edu...

www.sciencedaily.com...

This was covered a few months ago: Scientists create �brain� in a dish - flies plane simulation

Mod Edit: The original thread appears to be

Brain In A Dish Could Fly A Plane

[edit on 6-12-2004 by dbates]

So, who will be the first to suggest that these �rat-puters� were the real pilots in the 9/11 hijackings.

Originally posted by HowardRoark
So, who will be the first to suggest that these �rat-puters� were the real pilots in the 9/11 hijackings.

it looks like you won the honour, howard .

why not?

cool, think of the possibilities of that brain though? is it better than AI?